Burn for Me

Chapter 12

Bern drove with steady surety, obeying all traffic laws and regulations. Leon and Arabella both had their learner permits. Five minutes in the car with one of them behind the wheel was enough to turn my hair white, but riding with Bern was completely stress free. He had made a simple calculation: the cost of a speeding ticket in Houston ranged from $165 to $300 and would bump up his insurance. He didn’t have $165 to spare.

Three cop cars, their sirens screaming, barreled down the opposite lane. Good. As far as I was concerned, Mad Rogan could deal with them and leave me the hell alone.

“Remember you told me about how the Great Chicago Fire wasn’t started by Mrs. O’Leary’s cow? Your professor had some sort of alternative theory about it?”

Bern gave me a funny look. “Did you see the bus halfway in the ground?”

“I don’t want to talk about the bus.”

“Okay,” Bern said in a soothing voice. “We don’t have to talk about the bus. We can talk about the cow instead.”

“Is there any chance we could talk to your professor?”

“Professor Itou? Sure. I think he has office hours today. I’ll check when I get home. Why?”

“Something Harper said. She called Adam a glorified O’Reilly’s cow. I think she meant O’Leary.”

“She might have been using it figuratively,” he said.

“Sure, but I just want to tug on that string and see where it leads. It was so random and out of nowhere.”

“No problem, I’ll take care of it,” he said. “MII called. Twice. Sounded annoyed. They want you to call them back.”

Figured. House Pierce wasn’t happy about Adam setting an office tower on fire, so they likely leaned on Augustine Montgomery, and now he would lean on me. Crap rolled downhill.

I would have to call Augustine Montgomery. I wasn’t looking forward to it.

The cuts on my neck and wrists turned out to be shallow. Catalina helped me clean up and put Neosporin on them. I didn’t get much of a chance to recuperate. Bern came back with Professor Itou’s office hours, which were between two and four. I fixed my makeup and hair, put on a business suit—not one of my expensive ones but the simple middle-of-the-road grey—then we jumped into the car and drove to the University of Houston.

We found Professor Ian Itou in his office in the history department. He had someone with him, so we sat in the hallway, twiddling our thumbs. Students hurried back and forth, dragging their bags and overly caffeinated drinks. Everyone seemed so young. I wasn’t that much older, but for some reason I felt ancient. I was probably just tired.

Even when I was in college, people seemed young to me. I had a full-time job. For me, going to college meant get in, sit in class, turn my stuff in, and get out as soon as I could. I went to one fraternity party, and that was because I had a crush on the guy in my Criminal Justice Organization and Administration class. He had huge brown eyes and freakishly long eyelashes. Every time he blinked, it was an experience. We went on three dates, agreed that this was a bad idea, and parted ways. Eventually I ended up dating Kevin. He was a great guy, and he made my sophomore and junior years awesome. I was so comfortable with him. He just had this way of putting me at ease, and he almost never lied to me. We talked; we hung out; we had good sex and did all of the things that two young people in love usually did. I thought I would marry him. Not that he asked or I did, but back then I could see myself being married to him. It wasn’t a wildfire, high drama, heart-pounding-excitement kind of relationship. People started telling us we were like an old married couple three months after our first date. Kevin was just solid, like a rock. Being with him was so easy. No pressure.

My mother didn’t like him. She thought I was settling because Dad had died less than a year before and I wanted stable and normal. At the time it didn’t feel that way. Then, in our senior year, Kevin got accepted into a graduate program at CalTech. He invited me to move with him to Pasadena. I told him I couldn’t. My family was here, my business was here, and I couldn’t just abandon it all. He said he understood, but he couldn’t miss this opportunity. Neither one of us ended up being that upset about it. There was no ugly breakup, and there were no tears. I was bummed out about it for the first few weekends, and then I moved on. Kevin was in Seattle now, working for an engineering firm. He was married and he and his wife had twins six months ago. I had looked him up on Facebook. It made me a little sad, but mostly I was happy for him.

The point was that, while I was in college, I didn’t do all those typical things. I was never in a sorority. I didn’t belong to any clubs. If I came home at dawn, it was because there was some surveillance involved. People spoke about their college “experience,” and I really had no clue what it was all about.

I glanced at Bern. “Hey. You know, if you want to join a fraternity, you totally can.”

My cousin’s shaggy eyebrows crept up. He reached over and carefully put his hand on my forehead. Checking for fever. “I’m worried about you.”

I pushed his hand off. “I’m serious. I don’t want you to feel like you have to miss out on anything.”

He pointed at himself. “Programmer and cybermagician. We don’t join fraternities. We hide in our lairs in darkness and bloom under the glow of computer screens.”

“Like mushrooms?”

“Just like that. Except that mushrooms don’t bloom. They produce spores.”

The door to Professor Itou’s office opened and a girl with a dark ponytail walked out, waving a stack of papers. She glared at us. “He can take his B and shove it. A B! It was the best essay in the class!” She stomped down the hallway.

Bern caught the door before it closed. “Professor? I emailed you earlier?”

“Come on in,” a cheerful male voice called.

Professor Itou was about my height and about fifteen years older, athletic, with a compact, powerful build and hooded dark eyes. He seemed full of energy as he shook my hand and sat behind his desk, poised against a massive bookcase filled to the brink. His expression was cheerful.

“What can I do for you, Ms. Baylor?”

“I was hoping to find out more about your theories regarding the Great Chicago Fire. Bern mentioned that you didn’t think the cow had started it.”

Professor Itou smiled, threw one leg over the other, and braided his fingers on his knee. He looked like someone had just told him a really funny joke and he was still inwardly chuckling over it.

“It’s not something that’s often talked about in historians’ circles. In fact, my research into it has actually made me an object of not so gentle mockery. Academics.” He opened his eyes wide in pretended horror. “Vicious beasts. They’ll rip your throat out if you aren’t careful.”

Bern grinned. I could see why my cousin liked Professor Itou. This one academic clearly didn’t take himself too seriously.

“I’m armed,” I told him. “And if we get in trouble, we can put Bern in front of the door. He can hold off a whole hallway of academics. Nobody will get in.”

Professor Itou’s eyes sparked. “Are you sure you want the full account, because I’m not asked about this that often, and once I start, I will get giddy and might not stop for a while.”

I pulled out my recorder. “Yes, please.”

“Prepare to be amazed.” Professor Itou leaned back. “First the basic facts. It’s 1871 and the summer is very dry. Chicago, which was mostly wood, bakes in the heat, drying up until it becomes a tinderbox. It’s Sunday, October 8, 1871. Night has fallen and everyone is in bed. A few minutes after nine o’clock, Daniel ‘Pegleg’ Sullivan sees a fire through the windows of the barn belonging to his neighbors, Patrick and Catherine O’Leary. He sounds the alarm and runs to save the animals. Firefighters are notified, but they had spent the day before putting out a large fire and they’re tired. They go to the wrong neighborhood, and by the time they find the right house, the fire is blazing. They try to put it out and fail. For two days Chicago burns, until on October 10, rains finally smother the fire. Three hundred people are dead, over a hundred thousand are homeless, and the heart of the city is burned to the ground. The official cause of the fire was never determined. Later a Chicago Tribune reporter writes about the fire, claiming that a cow owned by Mrs. O’Leary kicked a lantern, knocking it into the hay. Mrs. O’Leary becomes a social pariah and dies a few years later, heartbroken, according to her family.”

Professor Itou leaned forward. His face took on a conspiratorial expression. He motioned me closer. I leaned toward him.

He lowered his voice and said softly, as if telling me a great secret, “The cow didn’t do it.”

“No?” I asked.

“No. The reporter admitted later that he added the cow for dramatic purposes. At the time, it fed right into anti-Irish attitudes. Here is another interesting detail: a study of the street proves that Pegleg Sullivan couldn’t have seen the fire from where he had been standing.”

“He lied,” Bern said.

“Exactly!” Professor Itou stabbed the air with his index finger, triumphant. “The Chicago fire was the subject of my undergraduate senior thesis. I have a somewhat obsessive personality, so I obtained a copy of an archived map of Chicago and was busily re-creating the spread of the fire on it by means of painting the buildings with a brush dipped in coffee.”

“Why coffee?” I asked.

“At the time it was the only dye available to me in large quantity. I was a poor college student, but I always had coffee. It was a required food group.” Professor Itou crossed his arms. “As I was mapping out the fire, a roommate of mine, silly practical mortal that he was, came to the kitchen in hopes of using the table for the mundane purpose of making himself a sandwich. He was a pyrokinetic, and he noted that the pattern of the initial burn was eerily consistent with burn rings that occur when a pyrokinetic employs concentric fire. Meaning someone had burned Chicago in circles. The fire had spread north and south, against wind direction. Furthermore, the velocity of the burn indicated presence of magic. Entire neighborhoods had been engulfed in moments.”

Late nineteenth century. The trials of the serum that brought out magic abilities were beginning, but it wasn’t common knowledge yet. It was possible that some early pyrokinetic made it to Chicago. “But why deliberately burn the city?”

Professor Itou raised his hand. “That’s the question I asked myself. I will spare you the full explanation. Here is the short version: the British military was administering serum to some of its officers in an effort to maintain its grip over the Commonwealth. One of these officers was Colonel Rudyard Emmens. The colonel had spent most of his service to the British Empire in “the Orient.” Unfortunately I could never quite figure out which part of the Orient. Eventually he retired to Chicago. We do not know for sure what his talent had been, but we do know from his personal journals that it had to do with fire. He was very conflicted about it. He was equally disturbed that these “hellish” powers had passed to his only son, Edward. At the time of the Chicago fire, Edward was eighteen. Here’s an interesting account: according to a noted Chicago historian, the center of the city remained extremely hot for almost two days after the fire died down. When firefighters were finally able to enter the steaming wreck that was Chicago, they found Edward Emmens in the middle of it. He was exhausted, dehydrated, and smeared in soot but otherwise unharmed.”

Only a pyrokinetic mage could stand in the middle of an inferno and survive. “Was he a Prime?”

“You would think so, but no.” Professor Itou grinned. “His magic was classified as Notable later in his life.”

“That seems an awful lot of power for a pyrokinetic mage of Notable rank,” I said.

“Indeed.” Itou turned around, peered at the bookshelves, and pulled out a red book. “David Harrisson, one of Chicago’s twenty-six police lieutenants at the time, took a particular interest in this occurrence and in the causes of the fire. Nobody knows what he actually found, because the powers that be seemed to have suppressed his investigation, but years later he began publishing crime fiction under the pseudonym John F. Shepard.” Itou flipped the book open. “‘The Devil’s Fire.’ A short story about a young man who steals his father’s prized African artifact and uses it to burn down Boston.”

He showed me the page and snapped the book closed.

“There exists a deathbed confession by one Frederick Van Pelt, detailing how he and three other young men met with Edward Emmens, who had taken a magical object from his father and was going to show them wondrous things. They met up at a barn whose owners were known to call it an early night, and they paid a local man to keep watch. He claimed that after the fire, the magical object was broken into three pieces and each piece was hidden away.”

I put two and two together. “So let me make sure I got it. Rudyard Emmens brings home some sort of artifact with him from somewhere in Asia. Then years later, his son uses it to impress his friends, loses control, and burns down Chicago?”

Professor Itou looked at me for a long second and smiled. “Yes.”

“How did it go with the senior thesis?” Bern asked.

Professor Itou’s eyes got really big. He waved the book around. “Funny you should mention it. I got terribly excited. I had all my sources. I worked for weeks. I had written a paper that would’ve made angels weep. I was the last to present my thesis before a panel of professors. They listened to me, nodded, and offered me a full graduate scholarship. Guaranteed admission, BA to PhD track, all expenses paid. Just one small thing—my thesis couldn’t be published. It wasn’t in the public’s interest.”

“They bribed you,” I guessed.

He leaned forward and tapped the book on the table to underscore his point. “And I took it. Back then I took it because I was poor and had no choice. Now I would’ve taken it for a completely different reason. The existence of amplification artifacts has been debated for years. We know that some people develop magic powers without the serum, and we know that magical objects can be created, so there is a possibility that an item which makes your magic stronger does exist. If such an artifact could be found, only tragedy would come from it. If it could be controlled, it would be given to a Prime and turned into a devastating weapon. If it couldn’t be controlled, any attempt to do so would result in a natural disaster. It’s best for this theoretical artifact to stay hidden. It is a lesson for us and a legacy of Colonialism. Stealing another nation’s treasures never turns out well.”

Edward Emmens was a Notable, a third-tier mage, and he had burned down Chicago. Adam Pierce was a Prime. If he managed to get his hands on such an artifact, he would go nova. Cold worry squirmed through me. Would anything be left after he was done?

“Do you know what it was?” Bern asked. “The artifact?”

Professor Itou shook his head, his face mournful. “No. I’ve tried to find out over the years, but I’ve failed. We don’t even know where it came from. We know it was most likely of Far Eastern or possibly Middle Eastern origin, but the cultural heritage of both is so rich and varied. It’s like looking for a needle in the proverbial haystack.”

I pulled out my phone and showed him a picture of the jewelry. “Could it be something like this?”

“Possibly.” Itou frowned and spread his hands. “Remember, we’re talking about Orient, meaning ‘East,’ an outdated term by modern standards, which took on different meanings through the years. In the 1800s, this term came to mean mostly India, China, and the Far East, but we can’t discount the Middle East. The Orient Express, for example, went to Istanbul. I could probably tell you more if I could get my hands on the Emmens family documents, but the family’s descendants refuse to speak to me. It would take someone with a lot more clout than I can scrape together.” He exhaled and waved his arms. “I’ve let it go.”

“What does this jewelry look like to you?” I asked. It never hurt to ask . . .

“An old TV antenna?” Itou frowned. “I’m afraid I’m not much help.”

“Thank you so much for the information. One last question: is there anyone in your department we could talk to about the artifact?” I asked.

Professor Itou grinned. “Magdalene Sherbo would be the one. Unfortunately she is currently in India as part of her educational outreach. We could try emailing her, but her email access is sporadic, and she is notorious for not checking her account. You might get an answer in a month or so. I once sent her an invitation to my wife’s baby shower. Two months later, she replied that she would love to come just as I was sending pictures of the baby to everyone with an email account.” He chuckled.

“Could we have her email address just in case?” Bern asked.

Professor Itou jotted an email address on a yellow sticky pad and handed it to Bern.

“Thank you again,” I said.

“Is the artifact about to surface?” he asked.

“I believe so,” I said.

All humor drained from Professor Itou’s face. He took out his wallet and extracted a photograph. On it a woman of Asian descent, her dark hair loose, stood next to two boys against the backdrop of a massive tree. The boys looked a lot like Professor Itou, with the same smart, mischievous sparkle to their eyes.

“This is my wife and children.”

“Your family is beautiful,” I told him.

“We live here, in the city. If the artifact is uncovered and someone attempts to use it here, in Houston, people will die. The Great Chicago Fire left three hundred people dead. The population density within our city is many times that of Chicago on the cusp of the twentieth century. If this artifact falls into the wrong hands—and really there are no right hands for it—the casualties will be catastrophic.”

He slid the photograph toward me. “You have discovered something potentially devastating and you can’t just walk away now. You have a moral obligation to them, to me, and to your own family. By virtue of possessing this dangerous knowledge, you are now partially responsible for our survival. Please keep that in mind.”

We left his office and walked across the evening-sun-drenched parking lot to our car.

“Do we go to the authorities?” Bern asked.

“If we do, we’ll only get one shot at convincing them this is serious. If we’re right and Adam wants this artifact and somehow gets his hands on it, it could mean mass evacuation. They’re not going to do something like that without some serious evidence. Right now all we have is a theory from a never-published senior thesis and a picture of some sort of jeweled doohicky. I’m all for going for broke, but we have to have something to go with.”

“So what now?” Bern asked.

“We go home and do our research.” In the morning, if all else failed, I would ask Rogan to see about getting the documents from the Emmens family. Professor Itou was right. The family wouldn’t speak to him or me, but they would speak to Huracan.

I looked at my family gathered around the kitchen table. My two sisters, my two cousins, Mom and Grandma Frida. I’d just explained in broad terms the story of the Great Chicago Fire and the artifact that could be tied to it.

“I need your help searching for the artifact,” I said.

“I have homework,” Catalina said.

Arabella glared at her. “Seriously? Can you not be so anal once in your life?”

Lina bristled. “Are you going to let her talk to me like that?”

“I’ll write you whatever excuse you want,” I said. “But we are short on time, and I really need your help.” I pushed the laptop toward them. “This is a map of the British Empire in 1850, when Emmens was probably in the military service.” I put the phone with the picture of the jeweled thing next to it. “This is what we’re looking for. It’s probably a part of something else, some sort of artifact. We each are going to take a region and try to look for an artifact that resembles this. Catalina and Arabella, you take China. Leon, India. Bern, Egypt. Mom, Turkey and Arabia. I’ll take the Far East. Grandma Frida, pick a team if you want. And not a word about this to anyone. No Facebook, no Instagram, and especially no Herald.”

They scattered.

I holed up in my office. It was nice and quiet. I put a candle under my oil warmer, dripped in some rose geranium, and went to work.

Needle in the haystack was putting it mildly. I tried image search. I tried historical search. I looked through Wikipedia and online museum galleries.

Nothing.

Eventually my head began to hurt. I pushed away from the desk, rubbed my eyes, and glanced at the clock: 9:17. I’d been at this for two hours, and I had exactly nothing to show for it.

At least the artifact part, if that’s what it was, was safely locked up somewhere in the bowels of Rogan’s dragon cave.

A ghostly memory of him touching me flickered across my skin. What the hell was wrong with me? I’d almost made out with him in the Galleria. After what he had done with Harper, I should’ve run for my life instead. It was one thing to be attracted to bad boys, something I usually didn’t suffer from. It was another to be attracted to bad men. Mad Rogan was a really bad, bad man. If he wanted something, he bought it, or persuaded you to give it to him, or just simply took it. I had to make sure he didn’t want me. Because if he decided he did, it would be on his terms, and I wouldn’t like it.

No, I would like it, which was even worse. If Mad Rogan suddenly appeared in the middle of my office, picked me up out of this chair with those hard, muscled arms, carried me into a bedroom, and threw me on the bed, at least 50 percent of me would be totally fine with whatever followed. It would be awesome. Just to see him naked, to see that honed, powerful body, to touch him, would be the highlight of my adult romantic life.

The other 50 percent of me would be livid. That jerk. No “Thanks for saving my life.” No “Are you okay?” No acknowledgment of a near-death experience. Oh no, no, he decided to critique my chalk drawing while I sat there on the pavement, bleeding and trying to catch my breath. I’d had it with all of them. I’d had it with their fires and their flying buses and exploding buildings. Had it.

It made total sense that Mad Rogan, a man who was rich, handsome, athletic, and a Prime, would turn out to be a self-centered bastard. What made absolutely no sense was why every time he said my name or looked at me, I needed ten seconds to snap back to reality.

It wasn’t just the physical pleasure or the intoxicating mental thing he’d done today. It was that terrifying, single-minded intensity he radiated when he focused. I just felt, with some sort of feminine intuition, that when he had sex, he committed to it completely. He would have sex the way other men made war. I wanted to be the only thing in the entire world he cared about, even if only for a few minutes. I wanted all of him, mind and body, to be mine.

And that was the sticking point. Mad Rogan would never be mine. I wasn’t the kind of woman he would eventually settle down with. It wasn’t even a matter of me not having money. I lacked the right pedigree. Primes married for magic. My magic wasn’t on the same level as his, and it definitely wasn’t the right kind. His power was primarily telekinetic, and his telepathy was slight. He would look for a telekinetic or a telepath. My magic was primarily will based and didn’t fit neatly into any category. I could get Mad Rogan only if he actually fell in love with me. The concept of being in love probably wasn’t even in his vocabulary.

If I threw myself at him, he probably wouldn’t turn me down. He would’ve made out with me in the Galleria. I was young and pretty, and he was an unattached man. Well, I assumed he was unattached. If he was attached, it probably wouldn’t stop him. There was an ugly thought.

Realistically, the only thing I could hope to get out of any relationship with him was a couple of nights of glorious sex.

God, it would almost be worth it.

No, no, it wouldn’t be. I knew myself well enough. I would get attached to him. It would be so hard not to—everything about him was exceptional. People like that just don’t come into your orbit that often. If I jumped into that deep water, I would drown. I didn’t want to drown. I couldn’t afford to drown. I had a family, a business . . .

The phone rang.

I jumped up.

It rang again. I grabbed it. “Yes?”

“Finally, Ms. Baylor,” Augustine’s clipped voice said.

Oh crap.

“What can I do for you?”

“I’ve reviewed the press coverage of recent events this morning. Perhaps I wasn’t clear at our last meeting. What part of ‘Apprehend Adam Pierce and deliver him to his House’ did you not understand?”

Oh you ass. “The part where I do this with no resources or assistance from MII.”

“House Pierce is unhappy. They are now financially liable for an expensive office building and are the target of several prospective lawsuits.”

“Perhaps they should’ve considered that possibility when they discovered Adam was a Prime. If they hadn’t raised a spoiled, immature egoist, they wouldn’t be in this mess.”

“Ms. Baylor.”

Someone pounded on the front door. “One moment,” I said. “I’ll be right back.”

I marched over to the door and checked the monitor. Mad Rogan.

I swung the door open.

Mad Rogan stood at my doorstep, holding a bouquet of carnations. The ones in the store had been frilly and delicate pink blossoms. These were huge, heavy blooms, crimson, glossy, so dark toward the base of their petals that they were almost black, with a border of bright scarlet at the edges. They looked dipped in blood. He might as well have brought me a fistful of rubies.

His eyes looked smug.

I looked at the flowers, looked at his face, and shut the door.

No, wait.

I opened the door, took the carnations from him, shut the door, and locked it. There. I’d had a near-death experience, and confiscating the carnations would make me feel better. I marched back into my office and pushed the button on the phone.

“I’m back.”

“You put me on hold.” His voice could’ve frozen the Gulf of Mexico solid.

I smelled the carnations. Oh wow. “Yes. Someone was at the door. It could’ve been Adam.”

I looked for a vase to put the flowers in. The only thing I had was a tall, decorative glass full of marbles because the office needed some knickknacks. I emptied the marbles into a drawer, opened a bottle of water I kept for clients, poured it into the vase, and set the carnations into it. Perfect.

“I don’t think you understand the severity of your situation,” Augustine said.

The warehouse shuddered. The entire structure vibrated for a second and stopped.

“In the last forty-eight hours, my house was the target of an arson. Then a car exploded in front of our door.”

The warehouse vibrated again. Mad Rogan was shaking my house. Damn it.

“I’ve been almost strangled, almost crushed, and almost buried alive. I understand the severity of my situation.”

Shake. Shake.

“Adam publicly embarrassed his House. This matter now involves not just you . . .”

Shake.

“. . . but the reputation of the entire firm and . . .”

“I’m going to have to put you on hold for just a second.”

“Ms. Bay—”

I marched to the door and opened it. Mad Rogan smiled at me. I jerked my hand toward my office. He walked in. I locked the door behind him. Mad Rogan stepped into my office and landed in a chair. Instantly my office shrank. There had been space before, and now there was Rogan.

I pushed the button again. “I’m back.”

“My patience is at an end,” Augustine said with diamond-sharp precision. “I have to report to House Pierce, and my report, apparently, will say that you’ve made no progress. You’re making MII look incompetent.”

I’m shaking in my slippers. “Why don’t you tell them the truth: you assigned this case to me because you expect me to fail. When I do, you will take my business and write it off.”

“I’m trying to give you a chance to keep your business,” Augustine said.

“She’ll have to call you back,” Mad Rogan said.

“What?” Augustine asked.

“I said, she’ll have to call you back, Pancakes. She’s busy right now.” He pushed the disconnect button.

He didn’t just hang up on Augustine. Yes, yes, he did.

“Pancakes?” I asked.

“When he was trying to enter the Arcana Club at Harvard, one of the initiation trials was eating the most food. That year, it was pancakes. He won and got admitted, but it took six months before he could walk by pancakes without getting sick.” Rogan smiled. “He’d smell them and run out of the room.”

“Well, Pancakes owns the mortgage on my business. You just hung up on my boss,” I said.

“He was talking in circles. He’ll get over it.”

“You know what your problem is? ‘You’ as in Primes, in general?”

“I think you’re about to tell me.” Mad Rogan leaned forward with rapt attention.

“Your problem is that nobody ever tells you no. You think you can do whatever you want, enter wherever you want . . .”

“Seduce whoever we want.” He grinned, a wicked, wolfish smile.

Oh no, we are not veering off the highway onto that road. “You play with people’s lives. When cops show up, you wave your hand and make them go away. Because you are Primes and the rest of us are, apparently, nothing.”

“Mhm,” he said. “The irony of this is so rich, it’s simply delicious.”

“I don’t see what’s so ironic about it.”

“I’d tell you, but it would ruin the fun.”

“Could you be more smug?”

He leaned on his elbow. “Possibly. I see you liked the flowers.”

I got a sudden urge to set the carnations on fire. “They are gorgeous. It’s not their fault you brought them.” I leaned over the table. “Mr. Rogan—”

“Mad,” he corrected. “Mad Rogan.”

“Mr. Rogan, here are some boundaries. You’re using me as bait for Adam Pierce. I’m using you as a means to capture Adam. I think you’re a dangerous man.”

“So formal,” Mad Rogan said.

“Here is the informal version: we have to work together, and when we’re done, we will go our separate ways. Don’t bring me flowers. We don’t have that kind of relationship.”

He laughed. It was a genuine, amused laugh. “You’re really mad at me.”

I was mad as hell, but saying it would be admitting that I’d let myself get emotionally involved, and he didn’t need to know that. “No, I just don’t want to compromise our professional relationship. It’s late and I’m tired. If you don’t have anything to tell me about Adam, please leave.”

“Thank you for keeping me alive earlier today,” he said. “I should’ve acknowledged it. I didn’t. In my defense, your circlework really is terrible.”

I opened my mouth to tell him where he could shove his circlework, when someone knocked on the door. What was it with the visitors tonight?

I went to the door and checked the monitor. Augustine Montgomery, wearing a silver suit, his glasses perched on his perfect face, his pale hair styled into a razor-precise haircut. Seriously?

“Who is it?” Mad Rogan came up behind me and peered over my shoulder. He was standing too close to me.

I didn’t want to let Pancakes in, but he still owned us. I unlocked the door.

Augustine stared over my shoulder, his eyes like ice. “What are you doing here?”

“I dropped in to borrow a cup of sugar,” Mad Rogan said.

“You shouldn’t be here.” Augustine looked at me. “He shouldn’t be here.”

“You got here rather quickly,” Rogan said.

“I was driving when I made the call.”

Behind Augustine, an elegant silver Porsche sat in a parking spot, all alone. We’d moved all of our cars inside, given that we couldn’t just order a brand-new one if one of them blew up.

“You might not want to park there,” Mad Rogan said. “I parked there yesterday and my Range Rover exploded.”

Augustine opened his mouth.

If we kept standing here with the door open, sooner or later my mother would come to investigate. If she realized that Augustine Montgomery—the cause of all our misfortunes—had appeared on our doorstep, she would shoot him. Just out of principle. Not to mention that we were sitting ducks here, lit up by the floodlight. The last thing I wanted was to have them both here at the same time, but I had no choice.

“Come inside,” I growled.

I led them both to my office. Augustine saw the flowers, blinked, and turned to Mad Rogan. “So you decided to involve yourself in this because of Gavin? Why the sudden concern for your relatives? So unlike you, Connor.”

Mad Rogan peered at him. “Why are you wearing glasses? I know for a fact that you have perfect vision.”

Here we go. This would end in them unzipping themselves to see who was bigger.

“You should’ve stayed retired.” Augustine’s voice was dry.

“And what’s going on with your hair?” Mad Rogan raised his eyebrows. “That’s a huge amount of illusion. What are you hiding up there? Are you prematurely balding?”

Augustine turned to me. “You have no idea who you’re dealing with. This man is extremely dangerous.”

Mad Rogan reached out toward Augustine’s hair, but lowered his hand. “I’d touch it, but I’m afraid I might cut myself.”

“Listen to me.” Urgency vibrated in Augustine’s voice. “You need to limit your association with this man. We exist in a fragile balance, and the core of that balance, the thing that restrains us, is our family. He feels no obligation to his family or anyone else’s. He has no restraint. You have no idea what kind of things he is involved in.”

And that, exactly that, was the problem with Primes. That right there.

“She needs to limit her association with you,” Mad Rogan said. “You’re trying to take her business.”

Augustine pulled off his glasses. “I may be putting her at risk financially, but you would take her life, if it was convenient, and make jokes about it later.”

Actually, Augustine was sending me after Adam Pierce, which was pretty much a death sentence.

Augustine kept going. “You have no code, Connor. You know nothing about duty or honor or self-sacrifice . . .”

Rogan moved, brutal and blindingly fast. Augustine’s back hit the wall, and Mad Rogan drove his left forearm into his neck, pinning him. His eyes turned cold and merciless.

“You spent your time after college sitting in a comfortable office learning the family trade.” His voice was precise and so filled with menace that the tiny hairs on the back of my neck rose. “This was your grand, self-serving sacrifice. You sat here, wrapped in your luxurious cocoon and wallowing in self-pity, while I spent six years starving and bleeding in a fucking jungle where all the money in the world couldn’t buy you a gulp of clean water. I did this so people I’ll never know could go to sleep in peace. What do you know about sacrifice? You never watched someone’s head explode from a bullet, then brushed pieces of human being off you and kept going. So how about you shut the fuck up?”

The room turned dark. Black bulges slid along the walls. Fear drained down my spine. Every instinct I had screamed at me that whatever was in the walls was bad and dangerous, and if it broke out, I needed to run.

“Don’t push me, Connor,” Augustine ground out. “You’ll fucking regret it.”

A violent, deranged light flared in Mad Rogan’s eyes. “Let’s test your theory about killing and jokes. I’ve got a good one just for this occasion.”

The bulges split. Ropy black tentacles shot out of the wall, flailing. If it was illusion, it was the best I had ever seen. Panic crushed me, chaining my feet in place. I shuddered in its grip. What the hell kind of magic was this?

Things rose into the air as Rogan sorted through my possessions, looking for a weapon.

No. This is my house. You will not wreck my house and put my family at risk.

The icy vise of panic broke. “That’s enough,” I barked.

The two men startled. Augustine frowned. “How . . .”

“What the hell is wrong with both of you? This isn’t some bar you can wreck. This is my place of business. This is my home! There are children sleeping less than a hundred feet from this room.”

The darkness vanished like a candle flame snuffed out by a draft. Rogan let go of Augustine.

“I don’t know which one of you is worse. Are you out of your minds? You’re both selfish, spoiled pricks.”

“Nevada?” my mother said behind me.

I glanced over my shoulder. My mother stood in the hallway with Grandma Frida next to her. My mother carried a shotgun. Grandma Frida carried her phone.

“Why are you screaming at an empty room?” my mother asked.

It had to be Augustine’s illusion. I glared at Augustine. “Drop it.”

He grimaced. Grandma Frida gasped. I had a feeling she and my mother just saw Mad Rogan and Augustine Montgomery suddenly pop into existence in my office.

“Get out of my house,” I said.

My mother chambered a round with an unmistakable metallic click.

The two men marched out of the office. Grandma Frida raised her phone and snapped a picture. The door closed. I landed into my chair.

My mother looked at the carnations. “Is there something going on that I should know about?”

I shook my head and picked up the phone. “Bern? Tell me you recorded all of this.”

“I’ve got it,” he said. “I saved a hard copy and offloaded it onto two remote servers.”

“Good,” I said. If there was ever a question as to why I needed to slap both of them with a restraining order, at least I would have plenty of evidence. Primes or not Primes, no judge would deny me a restraining order after viewing that.

Someone knocked on my bedroom door. I opened my eyes. I was sitting in bed, slumped against the pillow, my computer on my lap. I glanced at the electronic clock. Wow. 5:30 a.m. I’d moved to my bedroom after midnight, when my eyes had started glazing over. I must’ve fallen asleep. It had been a long day.

“Come in,” I called.

The door swung open and Bern entered, carrying a stack of papers. “Hey.”

“Hey.”

“The kids printed out some stuff.” He put it on the bed. His eyes were bloodshot, his face haggard.

“Were you awake all this time?”

He nodded. “I’d gone over some things. It’s not Egypt, Japan, or China, I can tell you that. Leon did some research on India, but he conked out, so . . .” He yawned. “You . . .” He yawned again.

“Get some sleep. I’ve got India.”

He sat down on the trundle bed. It used to be mine when I was much younger. Sometimes, when my sisters and I would watch a movie in my room, they would pass out on it.

“I’ll just sit here a minute,” he said.

“Sure.”

I leafed through the papers. Printouts of articles about various artifacts. Some weird doodle. A picture of a knight holding a shield against a gout of flame. “Not bad.” I turned to show it to Bern. He lay asleep on the trundle.

Poor guy.

I tapped my keyboard to wake the laptop up. Right. India.

Leon’s notes listed the search strings. India, artifact, Emmens . . . over thirty-five searches. I blew out some air. He was very thorough.

Let’s see, what did the guy say before the explosion? Something about gateway to enlightenment, or door to enlightenment . . . I typed in Indian artifact enlightenment. The search engine spat out image results. Lots of things about Native Americans and United Native Tribes. Let’s see, what about Hindu artifact enlightenment? Hmm, pictures of flowers, ancient palaces, mosaic, an illustration of some deity with four arms sitting on a pink flower, a metal statue of a deity with an elephant’s face, a photograph of some beer cans and empty soda bottles . . . how did that get in there? This was a wild-goose chase. I kept scrolling. City with a river lapping at its walls, a piece of quartz, another deity, blue this time, with white stripes across his forehead . . .

Wait. Wait, wait, wait.

I clicked the picture. An illustration of a beautiful man with blue skin and one hand raised looked back at me. Two white stripes marked his forehead, forming oblong outlines. I grabbed my phone and pulled up the picture. The exact same shape. My heart sped up. There was something else sitting on top of the outline, but the image was too small to figure out what it was. I clicked the link for the image’s page. A site selling antique beads.

I typed so fast that my fingers flew over the keyboard. Hindu god blue skin. The search engines spat out the images. No, no, no, yes! Exact same picture. I clicked it. Dead website. Damn it.

I kept scrolling. Another one, something about a video game. I clicked the image. Shiva. I had a name. Dozens of articles popped up. Shiva, supreme god of Hindu mythology. Chief attributes include a snake around his neck, a third eye . . . A third eye!

I clicked the images search and forgot to breathe. Here it was, a statue of Shiva with a jeweled ornament on his forehead: two oblong stripes of pale jewels forming a base for a crimson outline of an eye positioned vertically, with a radiant jewel in its center, where the iris would be. There were dozens of different photographs.

I kept following the trail of bread crumbs. Lord Shiva, he of three eyes, his right eye is Sun, his left eye is Moon, his third eye is Fire. Fire? Once when a god of love Kamadeva distracted Shiva during meditation and Shiva opened his third eye. Fire poured forth and consumed Kamadeva . . . Oh, this wasn’t good. More sites. When Shiva opened his third eye in anger, most things turned to ashes. Shiva the Destroyer. Shiva the Universal Teacher, whose third eye destroys ignorance. Shiva, who once revealed his infinity to other gods in a form of a pillar of fire.

It all fit. Emmens must’ve found this artifact on one of the statues of Shiva, and it turned out to be the real thing. If Adam Pierce got hold of it, he too would become a pillar of fire, and all of us would burn with him.

“Nevada?” My mother stood in the doorway.

“Shh.” I pointed at Bern.

She came in and sat next to me on the bed.

“How’s it going?” she murmured.

“We found it.”

I let her read the article. Her face grew darker and darker.

“Is that what Pierce wants? To burn everything?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I think you should take the kids and Grandma and leave the city for a few days.”

Mom looked at me. “Would that make it easier on you?”

“Yes.” I braced myself for an argument. I just wanted to make sure they wouldn’t burn to death.

“Okay,” she said. “I’ll pack up, and we’ll take a trip.”

“Thank you.”

“Whatever will take a load off your shoulders.” My mom paused. “Are you planning on working with Mad Rogan?”

“Yes. He’s still the only hope I have of bringing Adam in.”

“Nevada, how rich is Mad Rogan exactly?”

I frowned. “I don’t know. Bern looked into him. His words were ‘scary rich.’ Probably a few million, I’d imagine. Or maybe a few hundred million.”

My mom had a very neutral expression on her face. “And he’s unattached?”

“I don’t know, actually. He strikes me as the kind of person who has a very liberal interpretation of that word. Why do you ask?”

“Look outside your window.”

I got up and snuck to the window, trying not to wake Bern. Brilliant red carnations filled the parking lot. Some bright red, some dark, almost purple, they rose from planters—hundreds, no, probably thousands, illuminated by small red lights thrust between the planters, blending together into one giant beautiful carnation flower.

I closed my mouth with a click.

“They arrived around two,” Mom said. “Two trucks with flowers and eight people. Took them almost three hours—they just left a few minutes ago.”

“That’s crazy.” What was he thinking?

“It’s none of my business, but are the two of you involved?”

I spun to her. “No. No, we are not.”

“Does he know that?”

“He knows. I told him specifically not to bring me flowers. That’s why he did it. He probably thought it was funny.”

My mother sighed. “Nevada, even if he got these carnations for a dollar apiece, there are about five thousand of them down there, not including the labor and the time of the night. He must’ve given them enough money to drop everything and do this. That’s not a joke. That’s probably the price of a decent used car.”

“He probably dug it out of his couch.” I pictured Mad Rogan fishing for change in an ultramodern furniture. “I should’ve told him not to give me car parts. He would’ve brought a whole tank just to be contrary. Grandma would’ve loved it.”

“It’s your life,” Mom said. “I just never pictured you with someone like Mad Rogan.”

Oh no, not the unsuitable boyfriend lecture. I winked at her. “Who did you picture me with?”

She frowned, stumped. “I don’t know. Someone tall. Athletic.”

I giggled. “That’s it? That’s all you want from your son-in-law? Because Mad Rogan is tall and athletic.”

My mom waved her hands, flustered. “Someone like us. Normal. Money and magical pedigree, it’s a curse. Trust me on this.”

“Mom, I have no plans on doing anything with Mad Rogan.” I leaned against the window. “He kidnapped me and chained me in his basement. He doesn’t even understand no. The last thing I want to do is get emotionally or sexually involved with him. The man has no brakes, and that kind of power . . . it’s like . . . like . . .”

“A hurricane,” Mother said.

“Yes. Like that. I’m going to mind my p’s and q’s and keep him at arm’s length if I can.”

“What the heck are we going to do with all those carnations?”

“I don’t know.” I grinned. “We’ll figure something out.”

My mother shook her head and left.

I opened the window and looked at the sea of red below. The air smelled like flowers, a delicate but slightly spicy scent promising wondrous things. They were so gorgeous, my carnations. I didn’t know why he’d given them to me. It was probably a trap or some sort of manipulation. Maybe it was an apology. I had no idea, but I was sure that no matter how long I lived, no man would ever give me five thousand carnations again. This was a magical thing that could happen only once, so I stood there, breathed in the scent, and let myself dream.